hate twitter, but this is something its community notes gets right. it takes all of two clicks for us to see a removed comment and when it’s “Reason: misinformation” that does nothing to combat the misinformation.
like you don’t have to link articles for obvious stuff like antivaxx shit (though that’s appreciated). but when it’s like deep lore on political parties or terrorist groups, or when the comment is like 80 paragraphs long “reason: misinformation” doesn’t really cut it and doesn’t inform the community of what specific point(s) of information were false.
for all but the most egregious misinformation (such as those encouraging or threatening harm, which should be modded anyway for those reasons), if you can’t link an article in the modlog it’s almost better to leave the comment up and let your community do a paragraph by paragraph fact check for you. otherwise it’s just kind of festering out there unchecked, your servers are still hosting the misinformation, just in modlog form.
i think giving info correcting links was more common in the past so no idk why it’s uncommon now. hoping this can be some friendly constructive criticism :)
In a vacuum, sure. In practice, that forces the mod to do research on every batshit claim that’s commented/posted and opens the doors to just gish-galloping the mod team. You mentioned the citations being more common in the past? This is most likely why. We also just got out of a nasty election in the US, and misinformation and wild clams were running wild. Mods are volunteers and have lives and can’t fact check every foreign influence bot and misinformed lemming. Would love to, but, again, volunteer with a life. Sometimes you gotta shoot from the hip when wild claims are made, and if it’s pointed out later that’s actually correct, then it’s not uncommon to see comments restored.
I’m also in favor of modding first and restoring later if need be. “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can lace its boots” and all that.
I’m in favor of the opposite: If someone makes a wild claim, they should be citing credible sources to back them up.
Even something like “Removed: potential misinformation; please provide at least 1 source” might help improve things.
Yeah, absolutely.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of variables in the mix right now. I don’t think Lemmy UI does any kind of automatic follow-up on mod actions; just the modlog entry. Considering what I’ve seen in the modlog these last few months, I don’t really blame them for being a bit curt there lol.
Some 3rd party UIs will let you automatically reply with the action reason, but they’re all a little different. In other cases, instances rely on automod tools that detect the removal, but AFAIK, they just DM the user that an action has been taken. rather than anything other users can see (outside the modlog, that is).
TL;DR is that Lemmy’s mod tooling leaves a lot to be desired and has been / continues to be a source of many complaints.
Thanks for the explanation, I really don’t know how all this works in practise .=.
totally get that and as always thanks for your volunteer work!
love the point in your last paragraph. maybe mod comments like “cite this with a credible source or ban” are more helpful? idk spitballing. something to just encourage credible citation from some party rather than none.